


nothing ill come near thee

by Inkjade



Series: thy worldly task [2]
Category: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: Angst, Brothers, Families of Choice, Fighting, Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Healing, Jesper gives up on tact, Not sort of, PTSD, Self-Reflection, Sort Of, possibly too much of that, since it's wasted on Kaz, still not so much fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-26
Updated: 2019-08-26
Packaged: 2020-09-26 21:50:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20396698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inkjade/pseuds/Inkjade
Summary: Post-TCK. Traveling with Kaz through Lij on the way back from a visit to the Fahey farm, Jesper learns two things. One of them is about himself.





	nothing ill come near thee

**Author's Note:**

> Same scene as ghost unlaid, give or take a sentence, but from Jesper's perspective. It's not necessary to read part 1, though this will probably make a little more sense if you do.

Jesper Fahey swore the Saints were trying to tell him something. Something uncomplimentary, if the weather could be taken as a message.

“I’m sure the sun is shining over the Van Eck mansion right now, isn’t it,” he muttered. “Probably there’s a rainbow framing it nicely. Some dumb little birds twittering around it. Flowers in bloom out of season.”

He hoped Wylan was enjoying the break. One of them ought to be enjoying himself. He’d intended to, Saints knew. This trip had come at the ideal time—a few days away from Ketterdam, a chance to see Da and the farm without the obligation to stay, perhaps a dust-up with the local color to sharpen edges that had gotten distressingly dull in his new life of luxury—it had seemed perfect.

Instead Kaz, of all people, had volunteered to come along. It was a gesture which would have seemed alarmingly friendly coming from the Barrel’s youngest and most ruthless boss, except Jesper was living with someone who could scheme nearly as quickly and cleverly on a good day as Kaz, but who did it with much more altruistic intentions. This arrangement had Wylan Van Eck written all over it. Kaz Brekker didn’t make gestures of friendship. At least not ones any normal person would read as such.

He wondered, not for the first time, whether Wy had worried more about his safety or his wallet, and decided, also not for the first time, that he didn’t want to know.

Jesper cracked the whip above the horse’s rump. He nearly fell off the cart when Horse leapt forward and behind him Kaz gave a shove that nobody braced on a bad leg in two feet of slimy Kerch mud should be able to achieve. Trust Kaz Brekker to find a way past natural laws the same way he did the laws of men.

The cart slid back into its hole anyway. Nature apparently wasn’t having it.

“Any luck?” he called, just for the pleasure of hearing Kaz’s annoyed reply. It didn’t disappoint.

It was nice that some things in his life remained constant, he supposed.

  
~

  
He hated being wet.

It was the first thing he’d hated about Ketterdam: the salt-sewer stench of the harbor and the gutters, the way the rain seemed to soak right through his skin into his bones. The Kerch countryside proved itself equally malicious, though out here, everything smelled like manure.

Wylan’s house smelled like lilies most of the time. He’d always found that hilarious.

Wylan himself smelled like cinnamon and pine most of the time, except when he smelled like his chemicals. Or like Jesper.

“Here,” Kaz announced, evidently fed up with Jesper’s moaning.

The track he pointed at looked like a poor bet even to a boy with a gambling habit. He opened his mouth to say so, but something about the way Kaz was standing made him shut it again. He looked a little like he had in the days before they’d gotten Inej back from Wylan’s father: like that grim single-mindedness of his required more effort than it usually did.

Or maybe he was just regretting having breakfast from the tavern stewpot this morning; who knew?

“Are we about to accost some unsuspecting Kerch farmer and his wife for a place to sleep?” Jesper asked, and watched Kaz’s shoulders draw up.

_This had better not be a job_, he thought. _I’ll kill him if he’s come all the way to Da’s farm and back with me only to drag me into some project_.

Oh, who was he kidding? He’d leap in with both feet, eyes shut, and a song in his heart.

_You’d run smiling right into your grave if it meant you didn’t have to stop and think about why your feet were moving_, Wylan had said, when the shouting had died down to a quieter, bitterer sort of discussion. _There are places you can go I won’t follow, Jes._

_“_Onward to infamy, valiant steed,” Jesper muttered. He kneed Horse toward the distant promise of shelter. Horse cow-kicked, nearly throwing him off. Everybody was in a bad mood today. He’d been trying to find his way out of this one since they’d left Ketterdam. So far all he’d managed to lay hands on was the understanding that he’d been an ass, and maybe so had Wylan, but Wylan deserved something better than an ass and Jesper wasn’t so sure that _he_ did.

Up close, their shelter for the night looked like an abandoned farm, and also like an excellent spot for a quiet murder.

There was a stable of sorts: it smelled like mice and damp. Horse didn’t even care that the roof leaked. There was no fresh hay, which Horse did care about, very much. Jesper left him banging the boards and buckled his pistols in place, though the house hadn’t looked terribly occupied. Kulst vines strangled the thatch of the roof and climbed the walls. The place looked like it was slowly dying and needed to be put out of its misery. Jesper peered through the sheeting rain at fields choked with shrubs; at what looked like it might be an old orchard. Lij was, he thought, several miles out, but not so far they couldn’t have plodded onward to something vaguely resembling civilization.

Definitely not a job. So what the hell were they doing here?

He poked at the sprung front door with a finger, sighed, and stepped inside.

“I wonder how many vermin we’ll be sharing this warm and cozy bed with,” he said, and grimaced at the whine in his own voice.

Brekker was staring at something in the distance again. “You’re welcome to sleep in the yard.”

Jesper briefly considered bedding down with Horse out of spite, but shuddered at the thought of all the insect life he’d be feeding. “I’ll make do,” he groused, and trailed after Kaz like a sulky toddler toward what he hoped was a reasonably dry woodpile. Kaz spun on a heel and glowered him back. _This will be just like one of those novels_, Brekker, he was going to say to that scowl. _There’ll only be one moth-eaten blanket and we’ll have to share, and also to remove these terribly wet clothes, and then you’ll succumb to my manly charms in front of a roaring_ _fire_. Light and sharp, maybe enough to jostle Kaz out of his current strange mood and into the rarer one where he’d find his sense of humor and play along.

He didn’t get the first syllable out.

Instead Jesper blurted something about Horse and fled like his ass was afire and his hair was catching, back to the barn to dig a measly dinner out of their saddlebags. He spilled half the coin he’d won fleecing Da’s farmhands and had to dig around in moldy hay with Horse drooling down the back of his shirt.

He stuffed the purse away. He leaned against Horse’s warm withers. He unloaded and reloaded his pistols. Then he sat on a bucket (it creaked ominously) and rubbed at the stubble on his cheeks, and decided he hadn’t seen what he had seen.

The Bastard of the Barrel had definitely not been crying.

Right. He’d gone too long without decent sleep. The rain was making him see things. Pigs would fly first. Waffles would grow teeth and bite back. Somebody handsomer than him would be born. Jesper uttered a bewildered snort at what his brain thought was worth hallucinating and headed in with a peace offering of bread and cheese.

_A trick of light and rain,_ he told himself…but his stomach did a sick little turn when he saw Kaz standing in front of what was indeed a fire. He was hunched like he’d taken a hard punch to the gut, his hands clenched in barehanded fists. He looked like he was preparing to fight and expecting to lose.

“Kaz,” Jesper said, and nearly fell trying to put some distance between them when Kaz turned. Kaz Brekker was indeed crying. He didn’t even do _that_ like a normal person: he just leaked from red-rimmed eyes without any change in expression. Despite this, he was also as angry as Jesper had ever seen him, white-faced and coiled like a spring. It was an astonishing furnace of rage when everything about Kaz was always cold, calm, uncrackable.

Jesper was shocked entirely out of his week-long bad mood, and utterly at a loss for what to do.

If it were Inej he’d joke and flirt a little. If it were Nina he’d joke and flirt outrageously. If it were Kuwei he’d….well, joke and flirt outrageously.

If it were Wylan he’d…he’d…

It turned out joking and flirting outrageously might be all Jesper Fahey was good for besides shooting.

How amusing. Maybe he should just tiptoe out now: Kaz had the look of someone badly in need of a face to pound into bloody mush.

_Honestly, boy,_ he heard his Da’s voice say, that familiar weary tone. _You know better, so do better._

Three years in the Dregs, riding in Kaz Brekker’s deep shadow and pulling his crazy jobs, and this was the best he could give? Cracking the Ice Court and standing off the whole of Ketterdam and two other nations besides, and all he could offer was a soggy sandwich and some halfhearted wit? If this was the full measure of Jesper Fahey—gambler, loser, shooter, con artist, flirt, _quitter_—then Wylan did deserve better, and so did Kaz.

Jesper swallowed and stepped toward the fire. “I told Wy I wanted to come work for the Dregs again,” he said. He had the satisfaction of seeing Kaz surprised into distraction. “Not all the time. Not like before. But sometimes, if you wanted me to. Hot baths and salad forks are nice, but I’m useless, Kaz. I play the markets a little, and I’ve gotten better at Fabrikating, and I can help Wy run his businesses, but it’s not me. I’m bored. I need to do more than that. We broke Kuwei out of the Ice Court and took down Van Eck and Pekka Rollins and stood off half of Ketterdam, and now I’m a… personal assistant.”

He found he couldn’t look away from the fire now. He hadn’t intended to be quite so honest, or quite so self-pitying. _Useless_. Hell, maybe they could both cry. Wouldn’t that be a story for later.

From beside him came Kaz’s rasp, a little muted. “I bet he took that well.”

It was funny, from a certain perspective. “Oh yes,” Jesper murmured. “Words were had. Fragile things were thrown. I said some things I really wish I hadn’t.” And the memory of Wy’s face crumpling as his shots hit home was a knife in his heart: he’d been running from it all week. He breathed out around a lump of shame. “I think he did too. At least I hope he did.”

It was sit or weep, and this haunted old farmhouse had one too many weeping Crows already. Jesper sat. “What if I’m just irredeemably selfish and impulsive?”

“Probably you are.”

Jesper laughed miserably and rubbed his face. What was wrong with him? He’d clawed his way out of the stain of betrayal, crawled out of a nasty habit and a job that had nearly killed all of them—_had_ killed one of them—into something perfect. And it wasn’t enough for him.

Kaz did the unexpected thing and sat next to him. Jesper risked a glance: he was still leaking. He didn’t even bother to wipe his face, like if he pretended it wasn’t happening, Jesper would too.

Come to think of it, it was working.

“You think Wylan didn’t know that?” Kaz said, and stretched out his bad leg. “He seems to love you anyway.”

Jesper fought a sudden urge to giggle. He was moaning about his love woes to _Kaz Brekker._ He was never going to eat a waffle again for fear of teeth. He leaned forward over the knot in his belly and stared at the fire, at the old bricks, black with soot. Then all his self-pity fell away into the sort of bright, quiet clarity that came before shooting.

Scraped into one of the hearthstones, faint and time-worn, was the name _Kaz_.

Next to it: _Jordie_.

He sat still and let it roll over him. The Bastard of the Barrel had been a farm boy. The Bastard of the Barrel had had a family once. The Bastard of the Barrel had lived here.

He couldn’t make it fit.

_Saints_, Jesper thought. _Rietveld. You idiot, it was right in front of you and he _put it_ right in front of you and you still didn’t see_. “You grew up here,” he murmured, and felt more than saw Kaz stiffen next to him. “Jordie…was your brother?”

_Someone I didn’t want to lose._

Kaz seemed to be struggling again with the urge to hit him. “Yes,” he finally said.

“Are you going to punch me if I ask you what happened to him?”

He almost hoped for that. As often as he’d wished to see Dirtyhands taken down a peg or three, he’d never imagined something so normal in Kaz’s past. He could sense the grind of some hidden ugliness behind it, something capable of transforming the boy who’d carved those names into the monster every merch and thug in Ketterdam feared. Something perfectly awful in its ordinariness, probably. The rest was just…Kaz.

Who unfolded, in as few words as possible, a tale not very different from what happened to half a hundred boys yearly coming to Ketterdam to make their fortunes: an orphaning, a new beginning cut short by a standard con. Then a plague. Jesper bit down on a flush of pure fury thinking of all the years of jobs, of Kaz’s silent, single-minded war with Pekka Rollins; how it had nearly killed them in the Ice Court, and again in Ketterdam. How it had nearly broken the Barrel. Over a dead brother.

And how many dead brothers had they made between them, he wondered. How many Kaz Brekkers?

He shut his eyes. “And what happened to you,” he demanded. He was half afraid to know. He had to know. Had the bogeyman of the Barrel been born or made?

Stupid question: Kaz had been telling them all for years he had made himself, hadn’t he? And what did that make Jesper Fahey, besides a sidekick in an endless loop of greed and revenge? The half a sandwich he’d eaten roiled in his stomach.

“I lived,” Kaz said simply. Jesper shot him a look from under his brows.

Kaz was quiet for a long time. He stared at the floor. Then he took a quick breath. “The bodymen must have thought we were both corpses,” he told the far wall.

_No. Oh, no._ All Saints, he didn’t want to hear this. Kaz shut his eyes, opened them. “I woke up next to my brother’s on Reaper’s Barge. I swam back.”

“Saints,” Jesper murmured. He could see why Kaz hadn’t wanted to eat. “And then you spent the next nine years plotting to pull down everything Pekka Rollins ever built.”

So there was his answer: Kaz always had this in him. He’d just carved away everything else, every flawed, human thing, until what was left could gouge out a screaming man’s eye or stand off all of Ketterdam. A self-made monster.

With a fool for a sidekick.

_Honestly, boy_, sighed his Da again in memory. It was what he used to say whenever Jesper’d run right past a solution into something more complicated than it had to be.

_Stop treating your pain like it’s something you imagined_, Inej had told him. He wondered if she’d ever told Kaz that. He wondered if anybody ever had.

He sat back, watched the way Kaz’s fingers were digging at the floorboards, the effort he was putting into holding himself still, and thought. Ketterdam punished softness: it knocked you down and didn’t let you back up until you’d learned to knock down everyone else. Kaz was the quickest study Jesper knew, but he hadn’t yet managed to carve all his soft spots away. He’d knelt beside Mathias’s body. He’d been willing to yield both plan and pride, to give himself up to the stadwatch to get them all out of Ketterdam.

He’d slipped up and called Jesper by his dead brother’s name.

Which, Jesper decided, might be all the gesture he needed for now. He hadn’t paid attention to the important things; he’d been sniffing after words and gestures for years, but Kaz Brekker only gave himself away in his rare mistakes, and he always hit hardest when he knew he’d made one.

Like the moment before shooting, his finger on the trigger, the world reordering itself around his intention. _Take the shot. _

“Did it help?” he said, and nodded at Kaz’s gloves.

Gods help him, but pushing Kaz far enough to make him shout was satisfying in a horrible sort of way. Getting honest, unscripted reactions from Kaz Brekker was like winning at Makker’s Wheel all night: the kind of thrill you might not survive.

It was also an ache that twisted his guts when he pictured a little boy using his dead big brother as a raft because that was the only way to survive. _You still are, Brekker,_ he wanted to say. _You’ve been carrying that corpse with you since you crawled out of the harbor. Let go of it and live. _

He didn’t quite dare to cut that deep.

“Saints,” Jesper said, when Kaz wound down to a weary-looking silence. “Kaz, do you honestly not…?”

What did he think was on his face, rain? Half of the Barrel was a monument to his loss. The Dregs, what he’d made of them, were a living memorial. He’d built his family name into the biggest job of their lives. He’d brought them here, to this house, which Jesper would bet his shooting hand Kaz owned. And he thought he wasn’t mourning?

“_What_,” Kaz snarled.

Jesper flung up a hand. “You already are,” he said, braced for a fist to the face, maybe even a knife: this was, after all, the biggest mistake. “Kaz, you’ve been crying since you walked in the door.”

Kaz stared at him, face gone slack and startled. One hand made an aborted reach up as if to check. Something about the gesture broke Jesper’s stupid heart right in half.

He was spared having to come up with some new way to explain. Kaz fumbled for his cane and strode out into the rain, slamming the door shut behind him.

“Well, that went well,” Jesper said to the room. He ran a hand over his head and crouched to warm himself at the fire. _Kaz_ and _Jordie_ stared up at him from the stone. “Shut up,” he mumbled.

What a sad thing, to be jealous of a boy ten years dead.

He stood and leaned against the window, reevaluating the measure of Jesper Fahey while Kaz did whatever Kaz was doing outside—riding to Ketterdam with most of their supplies, most likely.

No: he was there still, a faint shadow of a boy at the edge of the light falling from the glass.

Jesper sat back down.

~

Kaz came back in dripping and shivering, looking settled but also rubbed raw, like he might have only just learned to tell difference between the weather in the world and the weather in his head. Jesper met his eyes briefly.

“I’m glad you decided not to make me walk back,” was all he said.

“It crossed my mind.”

Of course it had. He wondered why Kaz hadn’t done it. He lay back. He’d run out of words. Kaz finished the sandwich and flattened out too. There was a distant bang as Horse kicked the barn walls.

“There’ll always be a place for you in the Dregs,” Kaz said into the silence.

_What a good thing I’m lying down, or I’d fall over,_ Jesper thought faintly. Always the unexpected thing.

“Where do I sign?”

A switchblade slid into his view. “Right on that stone should do.”

Funny. Then not: a gift. It sank into him like warm whiskey. _Three years_, Jesper thought. _This is one hell of a scrap to throw me now, Brekker. _

His throat was tight. He sat up and breathed. “Don’t you complain,” he muttered when Kaz sighed. “You started it, Brekker.”

“What a pair of sad sobs we are,” Kaz grumbled, sounding disgusted. “Do it and let me sleep, Jesper. I’m done in.”

Jesper thumbed the knife and slid toward the hearth. He stopped with the tip hovering above stone.

“Hey,” he said. His voice wasn’t entirely steady, he was embarrassed to note. His stomach appeared to be trying to climb into his mouth._ It’s just a rock, Fahey_, he told himself—but, of course, it wasn’t.

“_What_, Jes.”

From the sound of it, Kaz wasn’t entirely immune to the weight of the moment either. Jesper drew a breath. “Do you think I can fit _he of the golden guns and firm buttocks_ under my name here, because if I should use a different stone—”

There was a noise behind him like two rocks grinding together. It rose into something more human-sounding: loud, surprised laughter. Kaz lay on his back, an arm over his face, shaking with it.

Jesper grinned and set the knife down gently.

It could wait until morning.


End file.
